Therapist Influencers & Mouse-Movers
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #146 ❤️
This week we follow the continuing saga of Elon Musk and his destruction of Twitter and the team morale of everyone who works there, the unfair reality of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in the traditional workplace, and how to make your website more sustainable.
Also, could you accept your therapist being an influencer? Plus the answer to snooping bosses.
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - Elon Musk Continues His Quest To Become World’s Worst Boss
Actually, he’s probably already won.
New Twitter’s HR department are continuing their policy of not telling people if they’ve been fired or not, and one worker took to the Twitter platform itself to try and get a response about their job situation.
After being frozen out of his work account for nine days, Halli Thorleifsson had still not received confirmation of whether he was still employed by the company or not. Taking his quest for truth to Twitter, he tweeted Musk himself with his dilemma.
His message was the following –
“9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees. However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You've not answered my emails. Maybe if enough people retweet you'll answer me here?”
Musk then asked what work he did, proceeding to send two crying laughing emojis at his response, and then tweeting a tirade about how the man was pretending to be disabled, which he later backtracked on with an “apology” – kind of.
Thorleifsson described the ambiguity around his job as “strange” and “extremely stressful”, later receiving an email from his HR department to confirm that his employment had come to an end.
You literally couldn’t make it up.
#2 - Subtle Discrimination Forcing LGBTQ Workers To Quit
The heteronormative nature of many traditional office workplaces is forcing LGBTQ+ workers out of jobs they would otherwise be happy in.
The assumption that everyone’s gender identity corresponds to their birth sex and that everyone is heterosexual can be ingrained in the environment and culture of many “classic” workplaces. For example, gendered dress code policies, official and unofficial, companies which don’t support same-sex couples ability to take parental leave, or water-cooler talk which, purposefully or not, alienates LGBTQ+ employees.
This kind of company culture can be unwelcoming to those who identify as LGBTQ+, and create a stressful working environment. Data also shows that this culture drives many employees to hide their authentic selves – more than half of LGBTQ+ employees questioned in one survey were not open about their identities or orientations with their supervisors, with a quarter not being out to their colleagues.
The stresses that come with hiding part of yourself at work, where you spend a lot of your time, leads to these employees leaving positions they would otherwise be excited about.
Data shows LGBTQ+ employees are increasingly prioritising working in an environment where it’s safe to openly be themselves – and are choosing employers accordingly.
Job-searching approaches have evolved: many workers within this group say they are actively choosing positions based on their environments, rather than on a company basis. And earlier this year, Jobs With Pride, a job board for LGBTQ+ employees to search for openings with companies that have been vetted to be LGBTQ+ friendly was launched, making the search easier.
Companies with a too conservative company culture, or who don’t make an effort to be inclusive to workers of all kinds, may be losing out on talent in the future.
#3 - Sustainability vs. Your Website
The Eco Friendly Web Alliance, an organization that offers accreditation for environmentally friendly websites, recommends a 1g carbon emission per page for websites. The BBC spoke with a sustainable knitwear business owner who was horrified to discover that her websites homepage generated almost 10g of carbon emissions. As were we. But what can be done to reduce the emissions?
Firstly, there are now several tools to expose this data, for instance, Website Carbon Calculator and Ecograder, which estimate carbon emissions on your site.
You can then switch to website hosting with renewable energy. Next, reduce the amount of data stored and sent across the network. Thanks to faster interwebs connections, sites don’t have to think about file sizes so much, meaning the average size of a web page has increased from 468KB in 2010 to more than 2,000KB today.
There are other tips, such as videos which only play when the user clicks on them, simpler site settings and less images. For example, Product design studio Quarterre worked with agency Future Selves to cut its website carbon emissions by 96%. Rather than using large hero images, the new site uses smaller images, arranged to create a composite design, and they don’t think the site loses anything from it – noting that the simplistic design actually stands out.
With a sustainable website design project, companies need to decide where they draw the line. The most efficient site would be text only, but of course, nobody wants to visit that in 2023.
#4 - Therapist Or Influencer?
The newest profession to take on TikTok are therapists. Why go to therapy when you can watch a punchy one-minute video about making decisions quicker, why you don’t have to say sorry, or how to set boundaries.
During the pandemic, when the world’s mental health fell off a cliff, the amount of mental health content on TikTok shot up. The #mentalhealth tag currently has 70.5 billion views.
While seeing your therapist on TikTok is a bit weird, a bigger problem is that when they post online, they may be using subject matter from sessions as inspiration – completely against the Hippocratic oath might we add.
This happened to one patient, who noticed that a couple of days after a session with his therapist, who he followed on social media because he found them online, would upload a video a bit too close to home relating to what they discussed.
While this patient never confronted their therapist, but felt pretty terrible about being used as content, some therapists are losing clients by being too honest on social media – nobody wants to know that their therapist hates their clients and finds them to be annoying whiners, for example.
How do we keep the professional and the personal separate when you’re profiting off your professional life in your personal online space?
And how do you find a therapist who won’t either use you for content or complain about how much they hate you on TikTok? Find a therapist over 65 I guess.
#5 - Active or Away?
With the rise of remote working, which doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon, a certain dilemma of being active or away on your work chat has arisen.
This dilemma has been, of course, capitalised on by an invention – the automatic mouse mover. While it already existed, it’s popularity has grown exponentially since the pandemic.
While “bossware” – software which tracks employees movements – gave everyone a bit of a fright last year, more mainstream work platforms like Teams still know what you’re up to through your status, which will move to “idle” when you leave your laptop for too long.
The mouse-mover, which comes in different forms, from mousepads that move an actual physical mouse to USB sticks which move your cursor, ensures that your Teams status is never idle again. Just make sure to keep your volume high so your boss doesn’t start asking questions about why you’re not answering their calls, when you’re having a nap or making a three course lunch.
Bosses who keep aggressively close tabs on their workers do not a motivated team make, and the popularity of these mouse-movers show a reactionary attitude which pits the employee against the employer.
Who is going to come out on top in the remote work tech war?
Brave & Heart over and out.
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